As with most businesses, marketing a LASIK practice has changed dramatically in the past couple of decades.
Where you might have relied on the YellowPages, billboards, and referrals in the past, you now have the world wide web, which has taken over all of these as the most important marketing tool available to LASIK practices.
And the most important asset you have in this space is your website.
People expect pretty much every business to have a nice website where they can learn more about you and the services you offer and get in touch.
But how do you know if your website is hitting the right marks?
Generally, it starts with these 5 things:
Don’t Mess These Up!
Site speed
We hear it all the time. No one has an attention span these days, as we’re constantly bombarded with new information, interesting content, advertisements, and things to accomplish.
That’s why, if your site is slow, it’s going to seriously hurt your ability to get people to stay on it. Even a half a second too slow can dramatically decrease the number of people who wait for it to load.
How fast, exactly, does it need to be? Generally, it should take no more than a couple of seconds.
You can see how fast your site is currently loading with a tool like Pingdom. And, although we’ll talk a bit more about mobile optimization in a minute, it’s worth noting here that your site might load more slowly on mobile than on desktop, which is a problem to watch out for.
Calls to action
Your website exists for one primary purpose: to help you get new clients.
However, it’s still amazing to see some sites that act as though the last thing they want is someone to get in touch with them. It’s often not easy to find contact info, meaning leads are more likely to leave the site without taking any action whatsoever. Don’t let this happen with your site.
Make sure you guide site visitors to their next step and give them some options. Make sure your phone number is prominently displayed so they can call you, add a contact form so they can send you a note, and include an email address where they can shoot you a question.
Don’t overwhelm visitors with options, but make it easy on them to get to the next step.
Mobile-friendly (responsive)
Last year, Google made a big change to their algorithm.
In the past, they’ve always had one primary index that included both mobile and desktop versions of sites. So, if a site ranked well on desktop, chances were it ranked well on mobile.
But, after Google announced in 2017 that they were getting more mobile searches than desktop searches, they decided to split their index into a mobile version and a desktop version. So, even if your site looks and functions great on desktop, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to do well on mobile.
This means that there is absolutely no excuse not to have a site that functions just as well – if not better – on mobile than it does on desktop. The power of our smartphones is changing the way that people interact with the internet, and it’s vital that LASIK practices keep up with that shift in behavior.
Good imagery
While there are a lot of elements to a site that influences how people interact with it, nothing is as important as a good first impression.
That impression relates to various design principles – including not overstuffing your page with information – but the most important part of first impressions is the images they see on your site.
Do they resonate with your audience? Do they look high quality? Are they original, or do they just appear to be a cheesy stock photo?
These are really important questions to address.
Video content
People love video content – and for obvious reasons.
Unlike written content, it’s extremely easy to digest, requiring much less concentration and time.
Because of that, video can help keep visitors engaged with your site, which not only helps them become more familiar with your brand but can also help your site’s rankings since Google pays attention to how long people spend browsing your website.
If people land on your site and just see huge blocks of text, there’s a much greater chance they’re going to quickly bounce away, meaning you lost that lead and hurt your organic rankings in Google.
Need To Revamp Your LASIK Website? Get in Touch!
At Patient Pipeline, we help LASIK practices with their digital marketing efforts, from running online ads, developing pipelines, building landing pages, creating email marketing campaigns, and – yes – designing websites.
If you’d like some help, whether you’re not sure if you need a whole new site or just some fixes to your current site, don’t hesitate to reach out today.
